I booked a stay in LuxxXL over Airbnb before looking through other sites and found out later that some sites like hotel.com offered the same room for way cheaper. I felt bad to cancel a confirmed reservation so I kept it. In hindsight I really should have cancelled. There are a lot of problems with this place so let me get the good out of the way first.
Good: The decor was nice and exactly like their pictures. The rooms were spacious and the location was not bad if you don’t mind a slightly longer walk to the stations.
Now let’s start with the problems. The first thing to note is the room was very musty, clearly not aired or used in a while. The cupboard smelled so bad I was worried my clothes would smell if I used it. The toilet door would occasionally jam so we left it open mostly. The TV screen was poor in quality with audio totally off-sync. The bathroom fixtures were loose. The wi-fi is unstable. The washing machine they have for shared use is unclean with soap gunks in the dispenser. The cleaning staff took out clean clothes on the bed and left them on the floor. The place was dusty and gave me a skin rash.
The rain shower took awhile to heat up since they are using a water tank located on the first floor. After settling on a nice temperature, I started to shower but ended up moving away every 1-2 minutes since the water kept changing between scalding hot and cold. Imagine washing your face and having it scalded suddenly. I contacted the lobby and they sent someone to check. The staff didn’t speak English, didn’t understand the issue and only showed me which was the hot water tap. I called the lobby again and the staff spoke to the receptionist (who can speak English). After their conversation she replied that he was sorry for the inconvenience but the shower was fine. I started trying to explain the issue again but the phone kept breaking up to the point where she couldn’t hear a single thing. She finally came up to check and told me their water system is like that. She honestly was really nice and helpful.
I messaged the host over the app and he offered to look into the issues and later bumped us up to their suite ensuring us that the water there was fine. The staff was to help us move but kindly only pushed our smaller luggage leaving us to carry our backpacks, 2 paper bags and our larger luggage. The suite seemed fine until the next day when I showered and the water switching happened again. Only the bathtub tap is mostly stable with all the shower heads having a problem.
I used to have a water tank and how it works is it heats water and stores it. Taps nearest to the tank would get hot water first. If hot water is used up, any taps further down the line will not have any. Their water tank I am very certain is too small a capacity to handle this many rooms over so many floors. Either that or their pipes just cannot handle a rain shower. If I wanted a subpar experience I would have booked a hostel for cheap rather than spend SGD 128 a night where I have to walk 15 mins back feeling tired after a blistering day to suffer through an unstable shower and poorly kept rooms. In comparison Mercure Ibis is right next to a BTS station and costs about SGD 100 a night so book that instead.